HARROW: A new composite image of Saturn’s largest moon Titan shows the cosmic body in all its hazy glory as seen by the Cassini spacecraft exploring the ringed planet and its moons.
Cassini captured the wide view of the world in infrared during a flyby of the moon on Nov. 13.
“During this Titan flyby, the spacecraft’s closest-approach altitude was 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers), which is considerably higher than those of typical flybys, which are around 750 miles (1,200 kilometers),” NASA said in a statement.
This distant flyby allowed the probe to capture wide views of Titan’s surface, revealing everything from the moon’s dunes — the dark regions — to the Menrva crater, the “largest confirmed impact crater” on Titan on the left side of the world, NASA said.
Some parts of the photo look more detailed than others because some Cassini images collected during earlier flybys were also incorporated into this composite.
Titan is one of the strangest moons in the solar system.
The moon harbors a hazy atmosphere with clouds of methane that rains down onto Titan’s surface, which in turn, plays host to liquid seas of hydrocarbons.
Cassini actually dropped a probe onto the surface of Titan in 2005, not long after the spacecraft first arrived at the Saturn system.
